"No cliche is more stupefying than that which describes Al Qeda as a throwback to medieval times.

It is a byproduct of globalisation. Like the worldwide drug cartels and virtual business corporations that developed in the Nineties, it evolved at a time when financial deregulation had created vast pools of offshore wealth and organised crime had gone global. Its most distinctive feature - projecting a privatised form of organised violence worldwide - was impossible in the past. Equally, the belief that a new world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction is nowhere found in medieval times. Al Qaeda's closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe.

-John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, p. 1-2